Abbott argues energy prices will fall with removal of Carbon Tax

ELEANOR HALL: The Coalition leader Tony Abbott is returning to familiar ground for the final week of the election campaign.

Mr Abbott is talking about the cost of living and his pledge to repeal the carbon tax.

Campaigning in Adelaide this morning, he's also been speaking about the Coalition's pledge to give the consumer and competition watchdog the task of making sure energy prices fall once the carbon price is removed.

Our reporter Naomi Woodley is travelling with the Opposition Leader in Adelaide and she joins us now.

Naomi, Mr Abbott's talked about the carbon tax for quite a long time now. What is he promising today that's new?

NAOMI WOODLEY: Well look I guess just putting some more detail around, as you say, the role of the ACCC, the consumer and competition watchdog, to really be charged with ensuring that the increase in power prices that has happened because of the price on carbon put in place by the Labor Government, if Tony Abbott is successful in repealing that legislation which is of course a big if. But if it happens then it would be the ACCC's role to ensure that those increases in prices were reversed.

And he's been announcing that they would get some extra resources in the, what we know is the new climate of efficiency dividends and a reduced public service under the Coalition. That isn't something to be sneezed at. So $16 million in funding for a dedicated unit within the ACCC to be looking specifically at this issue of prices around carbon pricing.

Let's hear a little bit about how Mr Abbott has explained this in Adelaide this morning.

TONY ABBOTT: The ACCC will have the resources needed to properly police prices. That's why there's extra funding in this policy to ensure that they can police prices properly and they can certainly police the impact on prices of the abolition of the carbon tax.

Now, we've done it before when the wholesale sales tax was abolished. That was policed by the ACCC. The ACCC did a very good job in ensuring that some prices went down as well as others going in the other direction. What they've done before, they can do again.

ELEANOR HALL: And that's the Coalition Leader Tony Abbott in Adelaide. So Naomi, why is Mr Abbott in Adelaide this week? I know that the both leaders have been criss-crossing the country, but what's the significance of him being there now?

NAOMI WOODLEY: Yes it's interesting, Eleanor. His first event this morning was a picture opportunity as so many of these campaign events are at a family's home for breakfast to talk specifically about cost of living. But that was in the electorate of Hindmarsh.

Now, it's held by Labor's Steve Georganas by 6.1 per cent. But the Liberals are very confident of picking it up. And commensurately, Labor's quite pessimistic about its chances. So it does tell us a little bit about the strategy and the confidence behind the Coalition.

I'd say this is the only stop that Tony Abbott will make in Adelaide this week. But instead of campaigning in the two most marginal seats in Adelaide, which are Liberal-held seats, he's campaigning in Labor-held seats. And ones with quite healthy margins. So I think the Coalition are quite confident that they can pick up those sorts of suburban seats in a city like Adelaide. And I'm sure that's a strategy that we'll see replicated across the final four days of the campaign.

From the Archives

Sri Lanka is now taking stock of the country's 26-year-long civil war, in which the UN estimates as many as 40,000 Tamil civilians may have been killed. This report by the ABC's Alexander McLeod in 1983 looks at the origins of the conflict as it was just beginning.